alvear

theperksofbeingseamus: Tumblr, teaching more about rape culture...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 20:30:21 -0400

Tumblr, teaching more about rape culture than they do in school

smithsonianmag: Photos of New York City’s Most Dangerous...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 18:00:07 -0400

Photos of New York City’s Most Dangerous Neighborhood

“Bandit’s Roost,” pictured above, was once considered the most dangerous part in all of New York City.

Jacob A. Riis was a police reporter in 1877 and decided to document the people living in New York’s East Side slum district. His book, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York, was the result of these photographs and was published in 1890.

Head over to Petapixel for more incredible photographs and info on Riis.

Photo

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 13:00:13 -0400

staceythinx: Some of the incredible images of Deserts Seen From...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 10:30:09 -0400

Ounianga Lakes in the Sahara Desert, Chad

staceythinx:

Some of the incredible images of Deserts Seen From Space, a much larger gallery from The Telegraph. Click on the images for locations and visit the Telegraph gallery for more amazing views.

sunfoundation: Thickness of the Ice Sheets

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 21:30:44 -0400

sunfoundation:

Thickness of the Ice Sheets

thehystericalsociety: Balanced - late 1930s early 40s (Via)

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 18:26:14 -0400

thehystericalsociety:

Balanced - late 1930s early 40s (Via)

sadstuffonthestreet: Blondes have more fun. Found by...

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 13:01:30 -0400

sadstuffonthestreet:

Blondes have more fun.

Found by mizqueenie

She is rail thin.

Photo

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 13:00:08 -0400

iheartchaos: Weird Stats of the Day: Toddlers killed more...

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 10:30:06 -0400

iheartchaos:

Weird Stats of the Day: Toddlers killed more Americans than terrorists did this year

Opposing Views brings some frightening (though obviously tongue-in-cheek) statistics about the future of America: more American lives have been claimed by gun fatalities involving American toddlers than terrorist attacks this year. In the past five months, a total of 11 people were killed by preschoolers with firearms compared to the four that perished in the Boston explosions — the only terrorist attack to occur this year. We can only hope the NSA will ramp up surveillance on children less than 5 years of age in order to counter this threat to national security.

meenerhabi: velvetlovepocket: “If You Know Someone...

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 20:30:18 -0400

meenerhabi:

velvetlovepocket:

“If You Know Someone Who Doesn’t Believe Sexism Exists, Show Them This”

Link here: [x]

Couldn’t finish watching it.

thepoliticalfreakshow: Remembering the Victims of the Sandy...

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 18:00:16 -0400

thepoliticalfreakshow:

Remembering the Victims of the Sandy Hook Massacre

Noah Pozner, Age 6

Noah Pozner left behind an “unimaaginable void,” his mother said in a new interview with People magazine about the Jewish boy killed in the Newtown shooting rampage.

The slain six-year-old boy’s siblings — especially his twin sister, who survived — are taking his loss hardest as they try to live their lives without the “vivacious” first-grader.

“We’re just emerging from the initial shockwaves, the numbness, the denial,” Veronique Pozner told People. “It’s not a linear thing. We go back and forth between these stages. But it’s starting to dawn on me that he will never come back.”

The interviews were part of a new package of interviews by the magazine with some of the 20 families who lost children in the Dec. 14 spree at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.

Like other surviving siblings, Noah’s sisters do their best to keep his memory alive. When his sister, Sophia, recently put together a Lego spaceship, she announced: “Noah helped me put it together,” the magazine said.

Why Noah’s Parents Wanted An Open Casket Funeral

If Americans knew what bullets did to human flesh, they’d support gun control. So perhaps they should be shown in living colour what bullets do to small bodies. A mere description is insufficient for the literal-minded.

Noah Pozner, 6, was one of the 20 child victims in the Sandy Hook shooting in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14. All the dead were shot between three and 11 times. Tiny Noah took 11 bullets. His mother, Veronique, insisted on an open coffin, Naomi Zeveloff reported in the Jewish Daily Forward.

You’ll probably remember Noah. He was a happy little guy with beautiful heavily lashed eyes and a cheerful smile. In his coffin, there was a cloth placed over the lower part of his face.

“There was no mouth left,” his mother told the Forward. “His jaw was blown away.”

She put a stone in his right hand, a “clear plastic rock with a white angel inside.” She wanted to put a matching stone in his left hand but he had no left hand to speak of.

Parents of the dead children were advised to identify them from photographs, such was the carnage. But every parent reacts differently. Veronique Pozner did the most difficult thing. She asked to see the body. Zeveloff asked her why.

“I owed it to him as his mother, the good, the bad and the ugly,” she said. “… And as a little boy, you have to go in the ground. If I am going to shut my eyes to that I am not his mother. I had to bear it. I had to do it.”

When the governor of Connecticut arrived, she brought him to see Noah in the open casket. “If there is ever a piece of legislation that comes across his desk, I needed it to be real for him.” The governor wept.

Death by gun isn’t real to us because we see it only in the movies. We occasionally see photos of human beings as meat, but they are almost always meat belonging to non-white foreigners after a bombing.

Those grieving often don’t share an editor’s delicate sensibilities. Jackie Kennedy, on Air Force One after JFK was shot on Nov. 22, 1963, was asked to change her clothes because the sight of JFK’s blood and brains was upsetting people. She cleaned her face and discarded her pillbox hat, but kept the bloodstained suit on. “Let them see what they’ve done,” she said. Mass shootings had not yet begun.

And what about the case of Emmett Till? Online Reddit readers commented on one obvious link with Noah.

Till, a 14-year-old black boy from Chicago, was hideously murdered in 1955 while visiting relatives in Mississippi. Allegedly, he had whistled at a white woman. Till was kidnapped, beaten, had one of his eyes gouged out, was shot in the head and his corpse tied with barbed wire to a 70-pound weight and dumped in a river.

His mother asked for an open coffin. “I want the world to see what they did to my baby,” she said.

The photo was reproduced and Till’s death became a huge news story. Three months later, Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus and the civil rights movement took a leap forward.

In these three cases, we see the difference between “telling” and “showing,” an old concept in literary criticism. Novelists can “show” events and let the reader draw their own conclusions or they can “tell” the reader the plot as it unfolds.

But the literary critic Wayne Booth came up with the concept of the “unreliable narrator.” Can you trust what you are being told? Reporters can tell you that 20 children were shot. But since American gun owners think reporters are unreliable narrators in the first place, perhaps they have to be shown what one man did to Noah because he had, not just one bullet, but a magazine of bullets.

We saw JFK’s skull fly apart. Emmett’s unrecognizable face was on show.

And that’s why Noah’s mother asked the governor to come and see her child’s corpse. He had already been told. He had to see it for himself.

tmbgareok: Our favorite starts at 2:10!

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 15:30:17 -0400

tmbgareok:

Our favorite starts at 2:10!

thepoliticalfreakshow: So much for self-defense!

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 20:30:01 -0400

thepoliticalfreakshow:

So much for self-defense!

oinonio: U.S. Gun Deaths Since the Shooting at Sandy Hook...

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 19:37:29 -0400

oinonio:

U.S. Gun Deaths Since the Shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, Newtown

courtenaybird: 1982: Welcome to Someday

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 13:22:57 -0400

courtenaybird:

1982: Welcome to Someday

dogsincars: Doggy needs a comforting hand

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 13:13:05 -0400

dogsincars:

Doggy needs a comforting hand

newleafliterary: Writer advice from Neil Gaiman

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 00:38:17 -0400

newleafliterary:

Writer advice from Neil Gaiman

humansofnewyork: “I didn’t have a happy childhood.”“If you...

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 22:24:15 -0400

humansofnewyork:

“I didn’t have a happy childhood.”
“If you could say something to yourself as a child, what would it be?”
“It’s not your fault.”

stfuconservatives: mswyrr: Sometimes I look at things like...

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 22:16:01 -0400

stfuconservatives:

mswyrr:

Sometimes I look at things like these graphs and I think to myself that politicians really can make a difference and more often than not the difference they make is hurting people. And then I think about how all the money spent incarcerating people could have been spent in programs of social uplift and it’s really inexcusable.

Average cost of incarceration in California is $60,000 a year. We could be sending all of our prisoners to Harvard. Or hey, we could be sending underprivileged high school students to Harvard! But instead, we’ve got this.

allthingseurope: Valletta, Malta (by Chris Azzopardi)

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 15:30:21 -0400

allthingseurope:

Valletta, Malta (by Chris Azzopardi)